Thursday, April 17, 2014

LP, Labs and More

Esther and Ava will head downtown for Ava's clinic visit today (Thursday). Ava will get another lumbar puncture (spinal tap), most likely to administer chemotherapy there prophylactically. She will also have labs drawn, so I'll report on those when I find out.

I have some more information not pertaining to the clinic visit that I'll share later, so check back to this post for updates.

As always, thanks for your prayers!

Update 9:45pm - Sorry I didn't get a chance to update during the day like I hoped.

Today was a good day! Ava's numbers were good; ANC is going up, hemoglobin and platelets are looking good, and her (peripheral) blasts are 0%. Hooray!

Remember the drug that caused her an immediate reaction? Well, there is an alternative drug they can use, but it has many downsides:
1) It is an IM injection (in the muscle) and not something they can give through IV. This means Ava would get an actual needle stick.

2) This would be a large bore needle (meaning the diameter is pretty big, not small like an Epi-pen which she doesn't like as it is). Meaning: it would hurt.

3) This would not be a one-time administration like the other one, but would require going down to Lurie's 6 days spaced out every other day, meaning every other day for almost 2 weeks.

THANKFULLY, the docs were really encouraged to see how well Ava seems to be doing. They said IF they started her on this alternate med, it wouldn't be until June (if they use it all). This would be really, really good news if Ava could skip this med altogether! Let's pray that God would make such a way!

Please also keep the bone marrow transplant in your prayers, that if it comes to that, Ava would have a perfect match. I don't know if there are any new developments on that one lead in Japan, but we still have 333 new registrants in processing, plus the ones who joined via mail, AND we have two more bone marrow drives coming up on April 26th! (I'll post more info on those drives in a separate post). SO... we still have potential matches in the works. It feels a little like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: will one of us be so blessed as to get that "golden ticket" and be Ava's match??? I guess we'll find out...

Thank you for all your love and friendship!

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